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How To Go Viral By Using Fake Reddit Likes

444 points by scribu 9y ago

0x00000000 9y ago
People get extremely defensive on Reddit if you insinuate that this is common. But it really doesn't take a whole lot of skepticism to see though the more blatant ones. Reddit is still a really great site when you unsubscribe from all default subs and any sub that has gone "critical shill" at about 100k or more subs.
- avaer 9y ago
  I wonder what the break-even is for buying defensive posts when people catch on.
  - metilda 9y ago
    Eh, you might as well spin up a few alts over Tor and occasionally use them to build karma, Reddit allows Tor users and registration over Tor. Not saying this isn't a good thing, if Reddit banned Tor a few of my favorite community members would disappear, and I'd likely drift away from the subreddits I do still follow.
    - symlinkk 9y ago
      who is your favorite community member that needs Tor?
- metilda 9y ago
  Defs, the smaller subs like /r/snakes and /r/circlejerkseattle aren't half bad (the latter replaced upvotes with upbikes, top kek) and are what keep me on Reddit. Just waiting for them to start banning subs again, I'll wager that /r/ChildFree will get banned as a hate sub, and that a few others will be banned around the same time. The total banning of discussion about the Pulse Nightclub Shooting on the major subreddits really pissed a lot of redditors off, as only The_Donald and /r/SandersForPres had decent conversations going on, with tens of pages of deleted comments in /r/News about the shooting.
- nateberkopec 9y ago
  Yeah, I don't experience a lot of obvious shilling on Reddit, but I've unsubscribed to most of the default subs and mostly just read small subs relevant to my interests.
  - camus2 9y ago
    > Yeah, I don't experience a lot of obvious shilling on Reddit When the same talking points are repeated over and over again on large subs and dissident opinions are automatically downvoted to hell, it's obvious there are organized efforts to push specific narratives or point of view. r/politics, r/news, r/worldnews are full of these, with sometimes the moderation itself in bed with the political astro-turfers, banning users that don't fall in line. Regarding the article, the news that was astro-turfed wasn't clashing with r/politics narrative. And since journalists and bloggers themselves now source their news and stories from Reddit, it helped spread that news all over the internet. Reddit is an extremely efficient viral marketing tool, both brands and politicians understand it now. When journalists start quoting reddit in their news that then get posed on reddit as news, we've come full circle.
    - patrickk 9y ago
      One of the most blatant examples is /r/bitcoin. Some context: https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7 https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...
    - ucarion 9y ago
      A sibling to this comment mentions/r/Bitcoin, which I agree has biased moderators. But I don't see such blatant bias in the large political subreddits. What views can't be expressed on /r/politics?
      - vxNsr 9y ago
        Anything remotely right leaning. /r/politics could more accurately be named /r/The_Left. Often the top comments of any thread are just whining about Trump in the same way that /r/T_D is just whining about MSM and Hillary. While there boy still posts that they won't tolerate useless comments I've seen nothing but useless comments there these days.
- jerrylives 9y ago
  /r/hailcorporate
- Algent 9y ago
  Some subjects touched anywhere on Reddit are huge instant bot/PR magnet. On top of my head I can think of: Fracking, Glyphosate (or anything related to Monsanto/Endocrine Disruptor), Turkish Politics.
  - 3pt14159 9y ago
    How easy is it to detect? Because it seems like a great place for a academic studying propaganda to evaluate real techniques in the wild.
  - 43224gg252 9y ago
    Definitely fracking and Monsanto. I've also noticed some software and hardware products seem to have a shill presence. I think we all remember that 6 month period where Microsoft decided to shove VSCode down every ones throat. It was impossible to get away from. New vim released? "Yeah vim is good but now I use VSCode TM". New sublime? New Atom? Same thing. They were aggressive with that one.
    - TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
      I once implied that Microsoft was targeting HN as part of that astroturfing campaign, and was threatened with banination.
      - hellbanner 9y ago
        On Reddit?
    - ascorbic 9y ago
      I saw loads of accusations of that, but very little evidence to suggest that these were shills, rather than real people who like VS Code. We all get very passionate about our editors, and lots of people use and like VS Code so it's not surprising people comment about it when the discussion is about editors. I like VS Code. I can't remember if I've ever commented to this effect. I'm not a MS shill.
    - philh 9y ago
- rmc 9y ago
  > Reddit is still a really great site when you unsubscribe from ... any sub that has gone "critical shill" at about 100k or more subs. AskHistorians is still a great sub, at 620k subscribers. It's (intentionally) not on the default list, and has very heavy handed, strict moderation, which is probably why the quality is so good. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/
  - DavidHm 9y ago
    One regret I have about AskHistorians is that I don't get to see all the hissy fits thrown by people who don't like the strict moderation and believe their speech should be uninpeded.
    - noxToken 9y ago
      I am a moderator on a major subreddit of serious nature. It's pretty boring. Here are the typical culprits. Probably the most common who have something to say to the mod team are those who blame us for pushing an agenda. We welcome and encourage debate. We want people to call bullshit on something bunk, but we stand by that it has to be something that can be substantiated. We just want you to provide some kind of proof, source, etc. other than, "This totally happened to my sister's boyfriend's cousin!" Some people take those removals very personally, because the comment is about something heavy that has greatly impacted that person's life. They feel like we are snubbing them when they took the time to reveal something personal. A non-real example would be a study that shows that cancer survival rate increases when you drink at least 60 oz of water daily. Someone will inevitably reply with, "My mom died from cancer, and all she dra nk was water with the occasional cup of tea." I mean, we're sorry for your loss, but your single anecdotal point doesn't really refute the claim. The comment gets removed, and then we're called monsters. If you really think it's bullshit, find another study that claims otherwise or poke holes in the study itself. Another common one reason is low effort comments or comments that don't add to the discussion. "Jeez, why is this a comment graveyard?" is a pretty common removal. There usually aren't hissy fits, but this, jokes, puns, lyric chains, comments like, "Yeah and water is wet," are also common. Two other low effort comments are, "Someone give me TL;DR please," or, "I want to believe this, but some comment is going to blow this claim out of the water." The reality is that most removals are boring.
- LutfuRadu 9y ago
  While still excellent advice for older accounts, I would like to point out the default subs are no more: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/6eh6ga/reddits_new_signup_experience/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/6eh6ga/reddi...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Haydos585x2 9y ago
This was an interesting read. I'm not sure it's the best idea as a blog post because I'm sure Reddit staff will get onto it then keep a much closer eye on this firm. I feel like journalists will be the same too. If I received 10 emails about these guys I'd be a bit skeptical that there is any actual interest. As an aside, I wonder if they're using the same tactics here.
- scribu 9y ago
  > I wonder if they're using the same tactics here. Comparing the number of upvotes with the limited karma bump on my account, there do seem to be a few suspicious votes happening.
- veb 9y ago
  They said they were using fake email addresses. I'm also not sure if there's any meaningful way that Reddit can fix this sort of issue either. Sure, they can keep an eye on some suspicious accounts but yeah... Usually you don't have to buy that many upvotes/likes/whatever either - usually just a few in the beginning helps seeds a post/tweet well enough that it starts to bring in the organic traffic.
- patrickk 9y ago
  The amount of spam, manipulation of news and opinion, and fake accounts on reddit is insane, and reddit's staff (actual paid staff, not moderators) do almost nothing about it. This story is only the tip of the iceberg. Look at the recent US presidential election, look at the ongoing, long running censorship on r/bitcoin, among many other examples. I moderate a small subreddit related to a niche sport and deal with a massive amount of spam and fake accounts, and reddit's spam policing tool (Automoderator) is somewhat difficult to setup, only partially effective and could be a lot easier to use (e.g. one click bans for accounts and domains) if reddit's staff were serious about the problem.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
  > I'm sure Reddit staff will get onto it then keep a much closer eye on this firm How can they connect this firm to random submissions and/or upvotes? I think even targeting fiverr would be difficult, because sellers aren't going to advertise which usernames they're going to us to vote. This is a very difficult problem to properly solve. Even if they can somehow guarantee each user account is one unique individual, what's to stop a company paying 200 actual, real people to go and vote on something on reddit?
flashman 9y ago
Look, I give them credit for coming clean to the public. And a lot of people use Reddit to promote their business, band or other brand (though they do it honestly, not by purchasing a boost). But the more well-known the technique of buying upvotes becomes, the worse the site will be for myself and other users. Early paid upvotes are the seed for later organic upvotes. You don't even need to spend $200 to get them.
- minimaxir 9y ago
  The onus is on Reddit to detect and punish voting manipulation. When someone proposed a similar voting manipulation trick on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362), dang explicitly notes that such techniques are a good data point for voting manipulation detection algorithms.
  - threepipeproblm 9y ago
    While Reddit seems less than competent to prevent this kind of manipulation, it does apparently violate Reddit's terms of service. "You agree not to interrupt the serving of reddit, introduce malicious code onto reddit, make it difficult for anyone else to use reddit due to your actions, attempt to manipulate votes or reddit’s systems, or assist anyone in misusing reddit in any way. It takes a lot of work to maintain reddit. Be cool."
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - slg 9y ago
      I am not sure it is even a question of competency. I think it is a question of motivation. It is the same reason why Twitter doesn't crack down on their bots. Both sites have an inherit interest in appearing popular. Having 50k upvotes or 50m followers looks more impressive than 25k and 25m. It is possible that those companies feel the value of those increased numbers is greater than the potential damage bots do to the community. HN doesn't have the same motivation since HN is more of a vanity project with a bigger focus on the good of the community.
minimaxir 9y ago
> This gave the campaign the boost we needed and it was all the direct result of one thing: hustle . Deliberately breaking the rules that exist for a good reason isn't "hustle." It's just cheating.
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  Isn't hustling by definition doing things that are ethically and legally shady?
  - inimino 9y ago
    Not at all. Hustle means going out and making things happen by talking to people and promoting yourself. It does not imply shady behavior at all. All entrepreneurs hustle.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      One of the Original definitions is illegal or unethical activities. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/hustle http://www.dictionary.com/browse/hustle
  - mod 9y ago
    No. There are several ways to use the word, and "hustling" as it's used around HN and in this article, doesn't mean it's shady. hus·tle verb 2.NORTH AMERICAN informal sell aggressively. "he hustled his company's oil around the country"
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  "Hustle", like "passion" and "wanting it", is a popular imaginary virtue to claim when your success was either down to luck, or something obvious and unimpressive (e.g. you paid a bunch of people to astroturf for you). These guys didn't do anything remotely new or skillful. All that's special about them is that they're brazen enough gloat openly about cheating.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
JonDav 9y ago
https://www.fiverr.com/gigs/reddit https://www.fiverr.com/gigs/reddit cough cough
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- vxNsr 9y ago
  I feel like reddit could spend the $10,000 to just buy all their services and then ban the accounts/IPs that they see.
  - j0rd 9y ago
    Good vote spamming business will be completely automated. They'll have accounts in reserve pool, with ability to spin up thousands more in a couple minutes. Most likely they make a couple hundred accounts a day and prime them with VA's with real content & votes with the intention of burning them with fake votes once aged appropriately. If you run a website and you're getting spammed, the worst thing you can do it also ban the accounts as this give spammers feedback that the account is no longer valid to use and they'll rotate it out. Best thing you can do is /dev/null the account. To the user it will look like account is working as expected, but on the back end anything they do doesn't actually do anything. Harder for spammer to know when that account is burned. This way they'll continue to use it, and you can use this data to find related accounts and /dev/null them as well.
  - j0rd 9y ago
    Good vote spamming business will be completely automated. They'll have accounts in reserve pool, with ability to spin up thousands more in a couple minutes. Most likely they make a couple hundred accounts a day and prime them with VA's with real content & votes with the intention of burning them with fake votes once aged appropriately. If you run a website and you're getting spammed, the worst thing you can do it also ban the accounts as this give spammers feedback that the account is no longer valid to use and they'll rotate it out. Best thing you can do is /dev/null the account. To the user it will look like account is working as expected, but on the back end anything they do doesn't actually do anything. Harder for spammer to know when that account is burned.
Stanish 9y ago
Not sure about hack-pr, but this really seems like an ad for the referenced site (fiverr)? If so, they are basically doing to this site what the article claims is good to do on reddit, which would make complete sense.
paultopia 9y ago
Didn't they just massively throw their client under the bus? Not hard to find the guy's name, and now everyone knows: - his big political stunt wasn't even his own idea, and - he paid people a ton of money to fraudulently promote it. What a way to burn your clients...
- rdtsc 9y ago
  They burnt one client but got 100 new, perhaps shadier clients. Probably not clients you'd want to have...
- deedubaya 9y ago
  Yeah. Either they care more about the lolz than future $$, or this, itself, is a made up story. What if this is just a ploy to make this, a possibly fabricated, story go viral to undermine the candidate? So meta.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Either way it's safe to say they're a shady group and one should avoid doing business with them.
- hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
  The PR firm isn't at all ashamed of what they've done, in fact they are publishing this as an example of what a great PR firm they are. After all, it shows their "hustle". It's odd, but not at all surprising, that someone in the PR/marketing world can fail to even see how something might be morally wrong with their scummy methods.
  - tunetine 9y ago
    Is that hustle? His last ditch effort was to use Reddit and was lucky it worked. No experience or expertise, and now potential clients know how little it cost.
    - gondo 9y ago
dchuk 9y ago
So I'm working on a side project that basically has an HN/Reddit interface. One monetization idea I had for down the road is basically a legitimate means to boost certain posts for certain periods of time, giving them prominence on the site in a clearly labeled area for such purposes. Is this something people would be interested in?
- mi100hael 9y ago
  ...you mean like Reddit's "Promoted Posts" that appear at the top of the page?
- King-Aaron 9y ago
  No
- 333c 9y ago
  Those are called advertisements.
rnprince 9y ago
If you're into this kind of thing, I enjoyed reading "Trust Me I'm Lying" by Ryan Holiday.
- raleighm 9y ago
  Also, if you're into this kind of thing, don't be. It degrades the environment where you do it.
  - rnprince 9y ago
    You can be into understanding the media around you without actually wanting to produce it yourself. However, if you are interested in adopting some of the takeaways, the strategies can be used tastefully and ethically. If you don't like the harmful ways that media manipulation is used, you might actually like that the book explicitly warns the industry how vulnerable it is to this practice, which can be used by anybody for any purpose. This warning came four years before the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
- pillowkusis 9y ago
  fantastic book about media manipulation. Very helpful in putting any type of media you see (reddit or otherwise) in perspective, and identifying where it is vulnerable to manipulation (which, on the internet, is virtually everywhere).
scotchio 9y ago
Speaking of fake Reddit stuff... Reddit has a SERIOUS political astro-turfing problem. Some would argue it swayed the US election. Some would argue Reddit is bought and sold. The popular or all experience is completely different. Commenting you don't even know if it's a real person or not. Does anyone know a forum similar to this or Reddit where it's ALL verified accounts?
- corndoge 9y ago
  Your local coffee shop. "All verified accounts" sounds like a boring echo chamber.
  - afriend4lyfe 9y ago
    Can you elaborate in your comment? What do you mean local coffee shop? And why is an echo chamber insinuated in that statement?
- scrooched_moose 9y ago
  Metafilter maybe. There's a one time $5 fee at signup and a 1 week waiting period after to post/comment. Seems to do a good job preventing this type of thing because the costs quickly get prohibitive if your dummy accounts keep getting deactivated. It's still an ugly echo chamber on politics though, it is extremely far US-left on everything.
  - gfody 9y ago
    Nominal fees don't work because someone will just lay the $5 per account knowing they can sell them later for more. Even Reddit accounts aren't free when you factor in the cost/time to set them up and build a bit of karma.
    - scrooched_moose 9y ago
      It all depends on how aggressive the site is on cracking down and banning dummy accounts and the cost of the "upvote packages" (which I can't seem to find). On Metafilter they seem quite aggressive so the accounts have very limited value/lifespans. A dummy account on reddit may be allowed to vote hundreds of times before being banned so the price per vote becomes minimal.
jawns 9y ago
The entire stunt appeals to people's sense of moral outrage over businesses buying influence in the form of political donations. The reason people find it morally outrageous is because it corrupts the political process: politicians are supposed to represent their constituents, not the whims of the highest corporate bidder. Politicians who engage in this kind of quid pro quo behavior put selfish gain ahead of the good of the community. Which is why I found it particularly galling that the PR firm relied on people's moral outrage about paying for influence to peddle their message ("tell them you like our initiative and are TIRED of politicians taking legal bribes") -- while doing exactly the same thing: paying for influence, in the form of purchased Reddit upvotes, which corrupts the upvote process and puts selfish gain ahead of the good of the Reddit community. Normally, when PR firms use "hacking" to describe their techniques, they're talking about novel approaches to getting coverage, sort of like how "life hacks" are novel solutions to life's problems. But in this case, the firm is using "hacking" very literally -- infiltrating and taking control of a system by illicit means. They are black hats, and we should view them not only as morally bankrupt but also very dangerous. I'm expecting that any day now they'll run a follow-up post, "How we hacked the U.S. media to help an anonymous powerful Russian client sway the presidential election."
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  Almost every modern campaign takes advantage of our hairpin tendency to get outraged. Hell, this entire thread is people getting outraged about "cheating" using millenia-old social tendencies. The solution isn't getting outraged about outrage. It's designing systems that compensate for this tendency. Unfortunately, that often means slowing down sensitive discourse.
  - tedmc 9y ago
    I think a good solution would be to get up early in the morning, assess what you'd like to influence or draw attention away from, and then craft a message that takes advantage of this tendency. Build windmills, not windbreaks.
  - thinkfurther 9y ago
HearMeRoar 9y ago
>How we hacked Reddit Really? Hacked?
- xyzxyz998 9y ago
  To be fair, this is probably the only time I've seen the term hacked used correctly. I no longer know whether I should use it in this sense or the "incorrect but used by almost everyone" sense.
  - mkl 9y ago
    I don't think it's used correctly here. They didn't hack together any code, they didn't hack on some multipart kludge. All they did was break rules by buying votes.
    - TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
      "Gamed" should be the word.
    - microwavecamera 9y ago
      Haven't you heard? Marketers call marketing tricks "hacking" now. o_o
imron 9y ago
> these are the types of things we do several times a day now And this type of marketing posing as news, pushed to the front page by bots and fake accounts is precisely why /r/politics is now a shitbed. Thanks Hack-PR.
- slg 9y ago
  Why would you consider this isolated to /r/politics? This happens on every subreddit that is big enough to have value in reaching the targeted audience. That is one of the many reasons why the best subreddits are usually the ones with the smallest communities.
  - imron 9y ago
    > Why would you consider this isolated to /r/politics? That was the one mentioned in the article and that is a subreddit that has been particularly awful since basically the entire last US election campaign.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - rhizome 9y ago
    The point isn't that it's just /r/politics, it's that this organization's announcement of their behavior is an advertisement for their services.
    - imron 9y ago
      Note also their closing line: we’re going to begin publishing articles like this to outline what we are doing that’s working so others can do the same Wonderful.
- jchw 9y ago
  It's why virtually any /r/all'd subreddit is a shitbed and has been for years. And to be honest, there's absolutely no chance it's just Reddit. People are cheating everywhere. Anyone with weak morals and either excess money or enough desperation is buying fake social engagement in hopes to find more real social engagement. And by doing this, it's ensuring that the playing field is not level for naturally going viral. Not that any of this isn't obvious, but blaming Hack-PR for one of the older internet tricks is a bit unfair. They're just one of the few shameless enough to simply say it with zero guilt.
danso 9y ago
I don't get the impression that there's any substantial vote monitoring, and so it surprises me that it even cost money to do this kind of astroturfing. How hard would it be to setup and maintain a dozen Reddit accounts and spread them over a VPN service? 10 min initial startup, and not more than a minute a day of doing innocuous activity on those accounts, occasionally. When a campaign rolls out, then have the accounts work in concert. Sure, it might not be as 100% successful as Fiverr (though I imagine it's fairly easy for Reddit to ad-hoc identify voting blocs if something was known to be bought). But you could employ additional optimization techniques, such as the one used by most high-karma users (e.g. Gallowboob): if a post fails to hit critical upvote mass, then delete and resubmit later in the day. To give you an idea of how things seem to be relatively unmonitored until users flag it, there's the story of Unidan: https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/2m5q11/a_feast_for_crows_the_fall_of_uunidan/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/2m5q11/a_fe... And as a more recent, obscure example, there was the mystery of why the mod of r/evilbuildings had something like 499 of the 500 most upvoted posts in his own subreddit. The math was so laughably in favor of manipulation but a Reddit admin, using whatever shit tools they have to investigate this, acquitted the mod: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/67r1ht/the_ceo_of_revilbuildings_gets_inconsistently/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/67r1ht/the_... Follow up: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/6ao8cv/drama_in_revilbuildings_escalates_as_the_mod_gets/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/6ao8cv/dram... The details of how this mod was able to boost his own posts without being called out for vote manipulation is too banal to explain in detail (basically, he would shadowdelete other popular posts so that his would get picked up by the Reddit front page, and then undelete the popular posts before anyone noticed). But the fact that a Reddit admin (I.e. a paid employee) thought that the evilbuildings mod always having the top post in his own forum for 6 months straight was just a coincidence, and/or because that mod was just apparently an amazing content submitter, spoke hugely about how uncreative the Reddit admins might be in detecting fraud. Edit: if you are interested in subreddit drama details, here's a thread that combines the evilbuildings drama and Gallowboob: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/6d3syc/evilbuildings_mod_malgoya_calls_out_gallowboob/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/6d3syc/evil... If this is the kind of effort users put toward imaginary points (though arguably raising karma is part of Gallowboob's professional work), I'm nervous to think about the schemes that PR firms will construct when they realize the easy return on investment offered by Reddit popularity.
notananthem 9y ago
That is the least hacky and also least efficient way to do that, and also make yourself look like a total goober.
oDot 9y ago
Comments here are missing one crucial thing -- it's a shame that success in Reddit depends so much on initial upvotes.
- ignawin 9y ago
  I thought the success depends mainly on luck.
visarga 9y ago
What I'm worrying about is that the reddit database is used by AI for learning dialogue and this kind of spamming actions just pollute the dataset.
- Bakary 9y ago
  Even without the spam the learning set would be cancerous.
visarga 9y ago
The OP is using techniques that used to work on the wild wild web 10-15 years ago. I thought by now everything is being normalized, or at least serious people don't use spamming techniques to launch a business. If all these bought upvotes come from new accounts, or from the same few IP ranges, or have a lesser ratio of comments to upvotes, or are interacting only between themselves and not with the larger community -> reddit can detect them and turn them into ghost accounts. Reddit needs to open up a Kaggle challenge for detecting rented upvotes and other abuses, use the data it has already shared with the AI community (the reddit dataset) to detect such attempts as they happen.
ameister14 9y ago
While I understand people finding this distasteful, it's exactly the kind of rule-breaking that they should be doing. Cheating? Airbnb broke Craigslist's rules to good effect, among others. It's naughty without being outright evil. When did that become a bad thing on HN?
RileyJames 9y ago
It seems that everyone is aware that likes, follows, upvotes, etc can all be bought, and therefore these numbers are manipulated regularly. But does anyone care to see the problem solved?
- omarchowdhury 9y ago
  You would have to solve the human being's innate attachment to number or as René Guénon terms the current state of affairs "The Reign of Quantity."
meant2be 9y ago
What would be the proper way of gaining traction on reddit? Is that even possible anymore? I mean if the game is already rigged what chance do honest businesses stand in this environment? I dont have an account on reddit (been there for what? 7 years now?) and I always wondered how somebody go viral and get traction now this stuff makes me think everything is basically done and paid for.
blackice 9y ago
Reddit should really try to proxy / VPN / Bot detection because I'm willing to bet the people on fiverr are using large proxy networks to achieve this.
illys 9y ago
Is this article for real? On a topic where one would expect citizens chasing for public good, we find marketers and advertisers working for a wealthy businessman paying a convictionless campaign to become famous! And the advertisers are so proud of it, they give all the details of their Reddit cheating, and worse, all the details of the absence of political conviction of their wanna-be-politician client. Maybe the story is real, but I cannot believe the advertisers are dummy enough to be the ones writing this article. I would better think of someone related to Fiverr.com behind... [edit: or an enemy/competitor of the politician]
- gfody 9y ago
  My thoughts exactly. Otherwise what's the point of mentioning fiverr.com specifically.
- microwavecamera 9y ago
  >I cannot believe the advertisers are dummy enough to be the ones writing this article If it were any other industry aside from PR/advertising I would give them enough credit not to do something like this, but in this case, I could totally see them doing something this stupid.
logicallee 9y ago
A lot of people don't seem to realize that being the top link on r/politics is a public good that's available to everyone. Just because someone pays $200 to make some politician's publicity stunt that nobody cares about be the top link there (I mean really, nobody cared - the idea of a law forcing politicians to walk around wearing the logos of their top ten donors is beyond silly), doesn't mean that everyone else can't also be the top link there at the same time, with other publicity stunts nobody cares about! The great thing about being a top link is everyone can do it at the same time. It doesn't corrupt the process at all or waste anyone's time. Everyone can benefit from it and it doesn't make things worse for anyone. For example imagine if all the top links on hacker news were just corporate advertisements disguised as stories. Would it be a worse place or cause any of us harm? Of course not.
- scribu 9y ago
  > imagine if all the top links on hacker news were just corporate advertisements disguised as stories. Would it be a worse place or cause any of us harm? Of course not. Did you leave out the </sarcasm> tag by accident? How can the front page being topped with "publicity stunts nobody cares about" not make it a worse place?
  - logicallee 9y ago
    of course, here: /s. Yes it was sarcastic. (I must say I'm a bit blown away that you think I require a sarcasm tag, though - I wrote that "everyone can be the top link", an obvious absurdity since how can everyone be the top link, and that hacker news wouldn't be any worse if every single link were a paid story. I didn't think I came even close to having to mark my comment as sarcastic, which I sometimes do.)
    - croon 9y ago
      You underestimate the levels of straight-faced absurdity of the last 6 months.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
lsmarigo 9y ago
Everyone does this, including the reddit founders themselves in the early days of the site (https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2 https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z4444w/how-reddit...).
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Doesn't make it right though.
PetrolMan 9y ago
Their client should definitely sue now. Especially if he had an NDA with them. The purpose of their article is to get new clients from HN and any other sources that they might impress. I wouldn't be surprised if they bought upvotes for this post as well. What they don't mention is that Reddit will eventually probably ban all the accounts that they've used, because the sellers from Fiverr use bots.
joelthelion 9y ago
Fake likes only explain part of this initiative's success. This would never have worked with an idea that doesn't appeal to redditors.
rmc 9y ago
The title of the article is "How we hacked reddit...", this submission currently says "How to go viral by using fake reddit likes", and is more accurate. They didn't hack reddit, they bought upvotes.
gehsty 9y ago
Maybe this is all just another 'viral' advertisement for a guy selling upvotes on Fiverr?
silimike 9y ago
This story brought to you by Fiverr.com
- geetfun 9y ago
  Seriously, right? Can totally see another article like this one with the title, "How I created a viral thread on hackernews and made X dollars on Fiverr."
ricksharp 9y ago
Dear Reddit, Maybe this idea would help slow down this type of abuse: It seems like it would be easy enough and cheap enough to build a honeypot to identify accounts used for the purchased Reddit upvotes. For example, Reddit could set up some honeypot posts to track paid upvote accounts. They then go and pay these upvoters to upvote the honeypot post and identify the accounts used. (It would be helpful if the post was hidden so other people don't find it accidentally. In fact, it is possible to just use a tracking redirect page given only to the paid upvoters and use any post as the upvote "job" so it would be hard to identify by the upvoters.) Then Reddit could ghost those identified accounts. Simply ignore their votes in the system, but don't tell the account owners, so the owners continue using the accounts without realizing the problem. This would make it very difficult for the account owners to know which of their accounts were compromised. Then on any new posts where these upvoter accounts are being used in majority, other accounts can be found. The other accounts that also similarly upvoted on this article could represent other paid upvote accounts. Track those other accounts and how often they appear beside the ghosted paid accounts, and voila, you have found more paid upvoters. Keep doing this and it makes the paid upvoters ineffective because although they can work the system, their work is only being used to find other paid upvote accounts and also clients who are paying for paid upvotes. After a time period, the clients could be sent a warning: It has been detected that you are using paid upvote services which are against Reddit TOS. Please contact customer service so we can work together to remedy the problem. Failure to do so may cause your account to be banned and all your posts removed from Reddit. Have a good day. Of course Reddit doesn't have to do this, and really anyone could do the same process to build a list of paid upvoter accounts and a list of articles and clients that use those services... So what do you think, would this put a dent in the upvoters effectiveness?
- 5trokerac3 9y ago
  IIR, there were a string of screenshots of Reddit admin/mod chats making the rounds last year where they were bemoaning how the Correct the Record money was going to start drying up. It's not just accounts that are bought and paid for. Every major social network is making money by shaping conversations around the interests of paying customers, political and otherwise.
- 9y ago
known 9y ago
VERIFY and TRUST; "Media does not spread free opinion; It generates opinion" --Oswald,1918 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West
paulpauper 9y ago
How about all the times this failed
Doubletough 9y ago
Looks like they've been shamed into submission and have pulled the article. It was getting hammered with comments earlier. Well deserved ones.
- Neliquat 9y ago
  Or their client list is now full and they pulled the ad.
soared 9y ago
Post was deleted, heres a cached link. mirror http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rGmQFErEWB8J:www.hack-pr.com/library/how-we-hacked-reddit-to-generate-5-million-media-impressions-in-3-days+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rGmQFEr...
Businessmen 9y ago
Should just setup a sting where we create multiple fiverr accounts and see who contacts us about what posts to try and promote
seoseokho 9y ago
Anybody have a copy of this? link is 404 now
- mgcross 9y ago
  Looks like it's archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20170710232311/http://www.hack-pr.com/library/how-we-hacked-reddit-to-generate-5-million-media-impressions-in-3-days https://web.archive.org/web/20170710232311/http://www.hack-p...
  - seoseokho 9y ago
    Thanks! wonder why they took it down though
Simulacra 9y ago
I don't know if this is a hack, per se. I work in media and PR, and this is just one of those things you do. Pump up the issue, get eyeballs on the campaign, find a way to jazz the reporters, and off to the races. What may have made this fly is that the idea was already in the minds of the public, and the media. It's a LOT easier when that happens.

444 points by scribu 9y ago

People get extremely defensive on Reddit if you insinuate that this is common. But it really doesn't take a whole lot of skepticism to see though the more blatant ones. Reddit is still a really great site when you unsubscribe from all default subs and any sub that has gone "critical shill" at about 100k or more subs.

avaer 9y ago
I wonder what the break-even is for buying defensive posts when people catch on.
- metilda 9y ago
  Eh, you might as well spin up a few alts over Tor and occasionally use them to build karma, Reddit allows Tor users and registration over Tor. Not saying this isn't a good thing, if Reddit banned Tor a few of my favorite community members would disappear, and I'd likely drift away from the subreddits I do still follow.
  - symlinkk 9y ago
    who is your favorite community member that needs Tor?
metilda 9y ago
Defs, the smaller subs like /r/snakes and /r/circlejerkseattle aren't half bad (the latter replaced upvotes with upbikes, top kek) and are what keep me on Reddit. Just waiting for them to start banning subs again, I'll wager that /r/ChildFree will get banned as a hate sub, and that a few others will be banned around the same time. The total banning of discussion about the Pulse Nightclub Shooting on the major subreddits really pissed a lot of redditors off, as only The_Donald and /r/SandersForPres had decent conversations going on, with tens of pages of deleted comments in /r/News about the shooting.
nateberkopec 9y ago
Yeah, I don't experience a lot of obvious shilling on Reddit, but I've unsubscribed to most of the default subs and mostly just read small subs relevant to my interests.
- camus2 9y ago
  > Yeah, I don't experience a lot of obvious shilling on Reddit When the same talking points are repeated over and over again on large subs and dissident opinions are automatically downvoted to hell, it's obvious there are organized efforts to push specific narratives or point of view. r/politics, r/news, r/worldnews are full of these, with sometimes the moderation itself in bed with the political astro-turfers, banning users that don't fall in line. Regarding the article, the news that was astro-turfed wasn't clashing with r/politics narrative. And since journalists and bloggers themselves now source their news and stories from Reddit, it helped spread that news all over the internet. Reddit is an extremely efficient viral marketing tool, both brands and politicians understand it now. When journalists start quoting reddit in their news that then get posed on reddit as news, we've come full circle.
  - patrickk 9y ago
    One of the most blatant examples is /r/bitcoin. Some context: https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7 https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...
  - ucarion 9y ago
    A sibling to this comment mentions/r/Bitcoin, which I agree has biased moderators. But I don't see such blatant bias in the large political subreddits. What views can't be expressed on /r/politics?
    - vxNsr 9y ago
      Anything remotely right leaning. /r/politics could more accurately be named /r/The_Left. Often the top comments of any thread are just whining about Trump in the same way that /r/T_D is just whining about MSM and Hillary. While there boy still posts that they won't tolerate useless comments I've seen nothing but useless comments there these days.
jerrylives 9y ago
/r/hailcorporate
Algent 9y ago
Some subjects touched anywhere on Reddit are huge instant bot/PR magnet. On top of my head I can think of: Fracking, Glyphosate (or anything related to Monsanto/Endocrine Disruptor), Turkish Politics.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  How easy is it to detect? Because it seems like a great place for a academic studying propaganda to evaluate real techniques in the wild.
- 43224gg252 9y ago
  Definitely fracking and Monsanto. I've also noticed some software and hardware products seem to have a shill presence. I think we all remember that 6 month period where Microsoft decided to shove VSCode down every ones throat. It was impossible to get away from. New vim released? "Yeah vim is good but now I use VSCode TM". New sublime? New Atom? Same thing. They were aggressive with that one.
  - TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
    I once implied that Microsoft was targeting HN as part of that astroturfing campaign, and was threatened with banination.
    - hellbanner 9y ago
      On Reddit?
  - ascorbic 9y ago
    I saw loads of accusations of that, but very little evidence to suggest that these were shills, rather than real people who like VS Code. We all get very passionate about our editors, and lots of people use and like VS Code so it's not surprising people comment about it when the discussion is about editors. I like VS Code. I can't remember if I've ever commented to this effect. I'm not a MS shill.
  - philh 9y ago
rmc 9y ago
> Reddit is still a really great site when you unsubscribe from ... any sub that has gone "critical shill" at about 100k or more subs. AskHistorians is still a great sub, at 620k subscribers. It's (intentionally) not on the default list, and has very heavy handed, strict moderation, which is probably why the quality is so good. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/
- DavidHm 9y ago
  One regret I have about AskHistorians is that I don't get to see all the hissy fits thrown by people who don't like the strict moderation and believe their speech should be uninpeded.
  - noxToken 9y ago
    I am a moderator on a major subreddit of serious nature. It's pretty boring. Here are the typical culprits. Probably the most common who have something to say to the mod team are those who blame us for pushing an agenda. We welcome and encourage debate. We want people to call bullshit on something bunk, but we stand by that it has to be something that can be substantiated. We just want you to provide some kind of proof, source, etc. other than, "This totally happened to my sister's boyfriend's cousin!" Some people take those removals very personally, because the comment is about something heavy that has greatly impacted that person's life. They feel like we are snubbing them when they took the time to reveal something personal. A non-real example would be a study that shows that cancer survival rate increases when you drink at least 60 oz of water daily. Someone will inevitably reply with, "My mom died from cancer, and all she dra nk was water with the occasional cup of tea." I mean, we're sorry for your loss, but your single anecdotal point doesn't really refute the claim. The comment gets removed, and then we're called monsters. If you really think it's bullshit, find another study that claims otherwise or poke holes in the study itself. Another common one reason is low effort comments or comments that don't add to the discussion. "Jeez, why is this a comment graveyard?" is a pretty common removal. There usually aren't hissy fits, but this, jokes, puns, lyric chains, comments like, "Yeah and water is wet," are also common. Two other low effort comments are, "Someone give me TL;DR please," or, "I want to believe this, but some comment is going to blow this claim out of the water." The reality is that most removals are boring.
LutfuRadu 9y ago
While still excellent advice for older accounts, I would like to point out the default subs are no more: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/6eh6ga/reddits_new_signup_experience/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/6eh6ga/reddi...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Haydos585x2 9y ago

This was an interesting read. I'm not sure it's the best idea as a blog post because I'm sure Reddit staff will get onto it then keep a much closer eye on this firm. I feel like journalists will be the same too. If I received 10 emails about these guys I'd be a bit skeptical that there is any actual interest. As an aside, I wonder if they're using the same tactics here.

scribu 9y ago
> I wonder if they're using the same tactics here. Comparing the number of upvotes with the limited karma bump on my account, there do seem to be a few suspicious votes happening.
veb 9y ago
They said they were using fake email addresses. I'm also not sure if there's any meaningful way that Reddit can fix this sort of issue either. Sure, they can keep an eye on some suspicious accounts but yeah... Usually you don't have to buy that many upvotes/likes/whatever either - usually just a few in the beginning helps seeds a post/tweet well enough that it starts to bring in the organic traffic.
patrickk 9y ago
The amount of spam, manipulation of news and opinion, and fake accounts on reddit is insane, and reddit's staff (actual paid staff, not moderators) do almost nothing about it. This story is only the tip of the iceberg. Look at the recent US presidential election, look at the ongoing, long running censorship on r/bitcoin, among many other examples. I moderate a small subreddit related to a niche sport and deal with a massive amount of spam and fake accounts, and reddit's spam policing tool (Automoderator) is somewhat difficult to setup, only partially effective and could be a lot easier to use (e.g. one click bans for accounts and domains) if reddit's staff were serious about the problem.
oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
> I'm sure Reddit staff will get onto it then keep a much closer eye on this firm How can they connect this firm to random submissions and/or upvotes? I think even targeting fiverr would be difficult, because sellers aren't going to advertise which usernames they're going to us to vote. This is a very difficult problem to properly solve. Even if they can somehow guarantee each user account is one unique individual, what's to stop a company paying 200 actual, real people to go and vote on something on reddit?

flashman 9y ago

Look, I give them credit for coming clean to the public. And a lot of people use Reddit to promote their business, band or other brand (though they do it honestly, not by purchasing a boost). But the more well-known the technique of buying upvotes becomes, the worse the site will be for myself and other users. Early paid upvotes are the seed for later organic upvotes. You don't even need to spend $200 to get them.

minimaxir 9y ago
The onus is on Reddit to detect and punish voting manipulation. When someone proposed a similar voting manipulation trick on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362), dang explicitly notes that such techniques are a good data point for voting manipulation detection algorithms.
- threepipeproblm 9y ago
  While Reddit seems less than competent to prevent this kind of manipulation, it does apparently violate Reddit's terms of service. "You agree not to interrupt the serving of reddit, introduce malicious code onto reddit, make it difficult for anyone else to use reddit due to your actions, attempt to manipulate votes or reddit’s systems, or assist anyone in misusing reddit in any way. It takes a lot of work to maintain reddit. Be cool."
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - slg 9y ago
    I am not sure it is even a question of competency. I think it is a question of motivation. It is the same reason why Twitter doesn't crack down on their bots. Both sites have an inherit interest in appearing popular. Having 50k upvotes or 50m followers looks more impressive than 25k and 25m. It is possible that those companies feel the value of those increased numbers is greater than the potential damage bots do to the community. HN doesn't have the same motivation since HN is more of a vanity project with a bigger focus on the good of the community.

minimaxir 9y ago

> This gave the campaign the boost we needed and it was all the direct result of one thing: hustle . Deliberately breaking the rules that exist for a good reason isn't "hustle." It's just cheating.

toomanybeersies 9y ago
Isn't hustling by definition doing things that are ethically and legally shady?
- inimino 9y ago
  Not at all. Hustle means going out and making things happen by talking to people and promoting yourself. It does not imply shady behavior at all. All entrepreneurs hustle.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    One of the Original definitions is illegal or unethical activities. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/hustle http://www.dictionary.com/browse/hustle
- mod 9y ago
  No. There are several ways to use the word, and "hustling" as it's used around HN and in this article, doesn't mean it's shady. hus·tle verb 2.NORTH AMERICAN informal sell aggressively. "he hustled his company's oil around the country"
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
"Hustle", like "passion" and "wanting it", is a popular imaginary virtue to claim when your success was either down to luck, or something obvious and unimpressive (e.g. you paid a bunch of people to astroturf for you). These guys didn't do anything remotely new or skillful. All that's special about them is that they're brazen enough gloat openly about cheating.
oneeyedpigeon 9y ago

JonDav 9y ago

https://www.fiverr.com/gigs/reddit https://www.fiverr.com/gigs/reddit cough cough

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
vxNsr 9y ago
I feel like reddit could spend the $10,000 to just buy all their services and then ban the accounts/IPs that they see.
- j0rd 9y ago
  Good vote spamming business will be completely automated. They'll have accounts in reserve pool, with ability to spin up thousands more in a couple minutes. Most likely they make a couple hundred accounts a day and prime them with VA's with real content & votes with the intention of burning them with fake votes once aged appropriately. If you run a website and you're getting spammed, the worst thing you can do it also ban the accounts as this give spammers feedback that the account is no longer valid to use and they'll rotate it out. Best thing you can do is /dev/null the account. To the user it will look like account is working as expected, but on the back end anything they do doesn't actually do anything. Harder for spammer to know when that account is burned. This way they'll continue to use it, and you can use this data to find related accounts and /dev/null them as well.
- j0rd 9y ago
  Good vote spamming business will be completely automated. They'll have accounts in reserve pool, with ability to spin up thousands more in a couple minutes. Most likely they make a couple hundred accounts a day and prime them with VA's with real content & votes with the intention of burning them with fake votes once aged appropriately. If you run a website and you're getting spammed, the worst thing you can do it also ban the accounts as this give spammers feedback that the account is no longer valid to use and they'll rotate it out. Best thing you can do is /dev/null the account. To the user it will look like account is working as expected, but on the back end anything they do doesn't actually do anything. Harder for spammer to know when that account is burned.

Stanish 9y ago

Not sure about hack-pr, but this really seems like an ad for the referenced site (fiverr)? If so, they are basically doing to this site what the article claims is good to do on reddit, which would make complete sense.

paultopia 9y ago

Didn't they just massively throw their client under the bus? Not hard to find the guy's name, and now everyone knows: - his big political stunt wasn't even his own idea, and - he paid people a ton of money to fraudulently promote it. What a way to burn your clients...

rdtsc 9y ago
They burnt one client but got 100 new, perhaps shadier clients. Probably not clients you'd want to have...
deedubaya 9y ago
Yeah. Either they care more about the lolz than future $$, or this, itself, is a made up story. What if this is just a ploy to make this, a possibly fabricated, story go viral to undermine the candidate? So meta.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Either way it's safe to say they're a shady group and one should avoid doing business with them.
hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
The PR firm isn't at all ashamed of what they've done, in fact they are publishing this as an example of what a great PR firm they are. After all, it shows their "hustle". It's odd, but not at all surprising, that someone in the PR/marketing world can fail to even see how something might be morally wrong with their scummy methods.
- tunetine 9y ago
  Is that hustle? His last ditch effort was to use Reddit and was lucky it worked. No experience or expertise, and now potential clients know how little it cost.
  - gondo 9y ago

dchuk 9y ago

So I'm working on a side project that basically has an HN/Reddit interface. One monetization idea I had for down the road is basically a legitimate means to boost certain posts for certain periods of time, giving them prominence on the site in a clearly labeled area for such purposes. Is this something people would be interested in?

mi100hael 9y ago
...you mean like Reddit's "Promoted Posts" that appear at the top of the page?
King-Aaron 9y ago
No
333c 9y ago
Those are called advertisements.

rnprince 9y ago

If you're into this kind of thing, I enjoyed reading "Trust Me I'm Lying" by Ryan Holiday.

raleighm 9y ago
Also, if you're into this kind of thing, don't be. It degrades the environment where you do it.
- rnprince 9y ago
  You can be into understanding the media around you without actually wanting to produce it yourself. However, if you are interested in adopting some of the takeaways, the strategies can be used tastefully and ethically. If you don't like the harmful ways that media manipulation is used, you might actually like that the book explicitly warns the industry how vulnerable it is to this practice, which can be used by anybody for any purpose. This warning came four years before the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
pillowkusis 9y ago
fantastic book about media manipulation. Very helpful in putting any type of media you see (reddit or otherwise) in perspective, and identifying where it is vulnerable to manipulation (which, on the internet, is virtually everywhere).

scotchio 9y ago

Speaking of fake Reddit stuff... Reddit has a SERIOUS political astro-turfing problem. Some would argue it swayed the US election. Some would argue Reddit is bought and sold. The popular or all experience is completely different. Commenting you don't even know if it's a real person or not. Does anyone know a forum similar to this or Reddit where it's ALL verified accounts?

corndoge 9y ago
Your local coffee shop. "All verified accounts" sounds like a boring echo chamber.
- afriend4lyfe 9y ago
  Can you elaborate in your comment? What do you mean local coffee shop? And why is an echo chamber insinuated in that statement?
scrooched_moose 9y ago
Metafilter maybe. There's a one time $5 fee at signup and a 1 week waiting period after to post/comment. Seems to do a good job preventing this type of thing because the costs quickly get prohibitive if your dummy accounts keep getting deactivated. It's still an ugly echo chamber on politics though, it is extremely far US-left on everything.
- gfody 9y ago
  Nominal fees don't work because someone will just lay the $5 per account knowing they can sell them later for more. Even Reddit accounts aren't free when you factor in the cost/time to set them up and build a bit of karma.
  - scrooched_moose 9y ago
    It all depends on how aggressive the site is on cracking down and banning dummy accounts and the cost of the "upvote packages" (which I can't seem to find). On Metafilter they seem quite aggressive so the accounts have very limited value/lifespans. A dummy account on reddit may be allowed to vote hundreds of times before being banned so the price per vote becomes minimal.

jawns 9y ago

The entire stunt appeals to people's sense of moral outrage over businesses buying influence in the form of political donations. The reason people find it morally outrageous is because it corrupts the political process: politicians are supposed to represent their constituents, not the whims of the highest corporate bidder. Politicians who engage in this kind of quid pro quo behavior put selfish gain ahead of the good of the community. Which is why I found it particularly galling that the PR firm relied on people's moral outrage about paying for influence to peddle their message ("tell them you like our initiative and are TIRED of politicians taking legal bribes") -- while doing exactly the same thing: paying for influence, in the form of purchased Reddit upvotes, which corrupts the upvote process and puts selfish gain ahead of the good of the Reddit community. Normally, when PR firms use "hacking" to describe their techniques, they're talking about novel approaches to getting coverage, sort of like how "life hacks" are novel solutions to life's problems. But in this case, the firm is using "hacking" very literally -- infiltrating and taking control of a system by illicit means. They are black hats, and we should view them not only as morally bankrupt but also very dangerous. I'm expecting that any day now they'll run a follow-up post, "How we hacked the U.S. media to help an anonymous powerful Russian client sway the presidential election."

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
Almost every modern campaign takes advantage of our hairpin tendency to get outraged. Hell, this entire thread is people getting outraged about "cheating" using millenia-old social tendencies. The solution isn't getting outraged about outrage. It's designing systems that compensate for this tendency. Unfortunately, that often means slowing down sensitive discourse.
- tedmc 9y ago
  I think a good solution would be to get up early in the morning, assess what you'd like to influence or draw attention away from, and then craft a message that takes advantage of this tendency. Build windmills, not windbreaks.
- thinkfurther 9y ago

HearMeRoar 9y ago

>How we hacked Reddit Really? Hacked?

xyzxyz998 9y ago
To be fair, this is probably the only time I've seen the term hacked used correctly. I no longer know whether I should use it in this sense or the "incorrect but used by almost everyone" sense.
- mkl 9y ago
  I don't think it's used correctly here. They didn't hack together any code, they didn't hack on some multipart kludge. All they did was break rules by buying votes.
  - TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
    "Gamed" should be the word.
  - microwavecamera 9y ago
    Haven't you heard? Marketers call marketing tricks "hacking" now. o_o

imron 9y ago

> these are the types of things we do several times a day now And this type of marketing posing as news, pushed to the front page by bots and fake accounts is precisely why /r/politics is now a shitbed. Thanks Hack-PR.

slg 9y ago
Why would you consider this isolated to /r/politics? This happens on every subreddit that is big enough to have value in reaching the targeted audience. That is one of the many reasons why the best subreddits are usually the ones with the smallest communities.
- imron 9y ago
  > Why would you consider this isolated to /r/politics? That was the one mentioned in the article and that is a subreddit that has been particularly awful since basically the entire last US election campaign.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- rhizome 9y ago
  The point isn't that it's just /r/politics, it's that this organization's announcement of their behavior is an advertisement for their services.
  - imron 9y ago
    Note also their closing line: we’re going to begin publishing articles like this to outline what we are doing that’s working so others can do the same Wonderful.
jchw 9y ago
It's why virtually any /r/all'd subreddit is a shitbed and has been for years. And to be honest, there's absolutely no chance it's just Reddit. People are cheating everywhere. Anyone with weak morals and either excess money or enough desperation is buying fake social engagement in hopes to find more real social engagement. And by doing this, it's ensuring that the playing field is not level for naturally going viral. Not that any of this isn't obvious, but blaming Hack-PR for one of the older internet tricks is a bit unfair. They're just one of the few shameless enough to simply say it with zero guilt.

danso 9y ago

I don't get the impression that there's any substantial vote monitoring, and so it surprises me that it even cost money to do this kind of astroturfing. How hard would it be to setup and maintain a dozen Reddit accounts and spread them over a VPN service? 10 min initial startup, and not more than a minute a day of doing innocuous activity on those accounts, occasionally. When a campaign rolls out, then have the accounts work in concert. Sure, it might not be as 100% successful as Fiverr (though I imagine it's fairly easy for Reddit to ad-hoc identify voting blocs if something was known to be bought). But you could employ additional optimization techniques, such as the one used by most high-karma users (e.g. Gallowboob): if a post fails to hit critical upvote mass, then delete and resubmit later in the day. To give you an idea of how things seem to be relatively unmonitored until users flag it, there's the story of Unidan: https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/2m5q11/a_feast_for_crows_the_fall_of_uunidan/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/2m5q11/a_fe... And as a more recent, obscure example, there was the mystery of why the mod of r/evilbuildings had something like 499 of the 500 most upvoted posts in his own subreddit. The math was so laughably in favor of manipulation but a Reddit admin, using whatever shit tools they have to investigate this, acquitted the mod: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/67r1ht/the_ceo_of_revilbuildings_gets_inconsistently/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/67r1ht/the_... Follow up: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/6ao8cv/drama_in_revilbuildings_escalates_as_the_mod_gets/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/6ao8cv/dram... The details of how this mod was able to boost his own posts without being called out for vote manipulation is too banal to explain in detail (basically, he would shadowdelete other popular posts so that his would get picked up by the Reddit front page, and then undelete the popular posts before anyone noticed). But the fact that a Reddit admin (I.e. a paid employee) thought that the evilbuildings mod always having the top post in his own forum for 6 months straight was just a coincidence, and/or because that mod was just apparently an amazing content submitter, spoke hugely about how uncreative the Reddit admins might be in detecting fraud. Edit: if you are interested in subreddit drama details, here's a thread that combines the evilbuildings drama and Gallowboob: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/6d3syc/evilbuildings_mod_malgoya_calls_out_gallowboob/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/6d3syc/evil... If this is the kind of effort users put toward imaginary points (though arguably raising karma is part of Gallowboob's professional work), I'm nervous to think about the schemes that PR firms will construct when they realize the easy return on investment offered by Reddit popularity.

notananthem 9y ago

That is the least hacky and also least efficient way to do that, and also make yourself look like a total goober.

oDot 9y ago

Comments here are missing one crucial thing -- it's a shame that success in Reddit depends so much on initial upvotes.

ignawin 9y ago
I thought the success depends mainly on luck.

visarga 9y ago

What I'm worrying about is that the reddit database is used by AI for learning dialogue and this kind of spamming actions just pollute the dataset.

Bakary 9y ago
Even without the spam the learning set would be cancerous.

visarga 9y ago

The OP is using techniques that used to work on the wild wild web 10-15 years ago. I thought by now everything is being normalized, or at least serious people don't use spamming techniques to launch a business. If all these bought upvotes come from new accounts, or from the same few IP ranges, or have a lesser ratio of comments to upvotes, or are interacting only between themselves and not with the larger community -> reddit can detect them and turn them into ghost accounts. Reddit needs to open up a Kaggle challenge for detecting rented upvotes and other abuses, use the data it has already shared with the AI community (the reddit dataset) to detect such attempts as they happen.

ameister14 9y ago

While I understand people finding this distasteful, it's exactly the kind of rule-breaking that they should be doing. Cheating? Airbnb broke Craigslist's rules to good effect, among others. It's naughty without being outright evil. When did that become a bad thing on HN?

RileyJames 9y ago

It seems that everyone is aware that likes, follows, upvotes, etc can all be bought, and therefore these numbers are manipulated regularly. But does anyone care to see the problem solved?

omarchowdhury 9y ago
You would have to solve the human being's innate attachment to number or as René Guénon terms the current state of affairs "The Reign of Quantity."

meant2be 9y ago

What would be the proper way of gaining traction on reddit? Is that even possible anymore? I mean if the game is already rigged what chance do honest businesses stand in this environment? I dont have an account on reddit (been there for what? 7 years now?) and I always wondered how somebody go viral and get traction now this stuff makes me think everything is basically done and paid for.

blackice 9y ago

Reddit should really try to proxy / VPN / Bot detection because I'm willing to bet the people on fiverr are using large proxy networks to achieve this.

illys 9y ago

Is this article for real? On a topic where one would expect citizens chasing for public good, we find marketers and advertisers working for a wealthy businessman paying a convictionless campaign to become famous! And the advertisers are so proud of it, they give all the details of their Reddit cheating, and worse, all the details of the absence of political conviction of their wanna-be-politician client. Maybe the story is real, but I cannot believe the advertisers are dummy enough to be the ones writing this article. I would better think of someone related to Fiverr.com behind... [edit: or an enemy/competitor of the politician]

gfody 9y ago
My thoughts exactly. Otherwise what's the point of mentioning fiverr.com specifically.
microwavecamera 9y ago
>I cannot believe the advertisers are dummy enough to be the ones writing this article If it were any other industry aside from PR/advertising I would give them enough credit not to do something like this, but in this case, I could totally see them doing something this stupid.

logicallee 9y ago

A lot of people don't seem to realize that being the top link on r/politics is a public good that's available to everyone. Just because someone pays $200 to make some politician's publicity stunt that nobody cares about be the top link there (I mean really, nobody cared - the idea of a law forcing politicians to walk around wearing the logos of their top ten donors is beyond silly), doesn't mean that everyone else can't also be the top link there at the same time, with other publicity stunts nobody cares about! The great thing about being a top link is everyone can do it at the same time. It doesn't corrupt the process at all or waste anyone's time. Everyone can benefit from it and it doesn't make things worse for anyone. For example imagine if all the top links on hacker news were just corporate advertisements disguised as stories. Would it be a worse place or cause any of us harm? Of course not.

scribu 9y ago
> imagine if all the top links on hacker news were just corporate advertisements disguised as stories. Would it be a worse place or cause any of us harm? Of course not. Did you leave out the </sarcasm> tag by accident? How can the front page being topped with "publicity stunts nobody cares about" not make it a worse place?
- logicallee 9y ago
  of course, here: /s. Yes it was sarcastic. (I must say I'm a bit blown away that you think I require a sarcasm tag, though - I wrote that "everyone can be the top link", an obvious absurdity since how can everyone be the top link, and that hacker news wouldn't be any worse if every single link were a paid story. I didn't think I came even close to having to mark my comment as sarcastic, which I sometimes do.)
  - croon 9y ago
    You underestimate the levels of straight-faced absurdity of the last 6 months.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

lsmarigo 9y ago

Everyone does this, including the reddit founders themselves in the early days of the site (https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2 https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z4444w/how-reddit...).

TeMPOraL 9y ago
Doesn't make it right though.

PetrolMan 9y ago

Their client should definitely sue now. Especially if he had an NDA with them. The purpose of their article is to get new clients from HN and any other sources that they might impress. I wouldn't be surprised if they bought upvotes for this post as well. What they don't mention is that Reddit will eventually probably ban all the accounts that they've used, because the sellers from Fiverr use bots.

joelthelion 9y ago

Fake likes only explain part of this initiative's success. This would never have worked with an idea that doesn't appeal to redditors.

rmc 9y ago

The title of the article is "How we hacked reddit...", this submission currently says "How to go viral by using fake reddit likes", and is more accurate. They didn't hack reddit, they bought upvotes.

gehsty 9y ago

Maybe this is all just another 'viral' advertisement for a guy selling upvotes on Fiverr?

silimike 9y ago

This story brought to you by Fiverr.com

geetfun 9y ago
Seriously, right? Can totally see another article like this one with the title, "How I created a viral thread on hackernews and made X dollars on Fiverr."

ricksharp 9y ago

Dear Reddit, Maybe this idea would help slow down this type of abuse: It seems like it would be easy enough and cheap enough to build a honeypot to identify accounts used for the purchased Reddit upvotes. For example, Reddit could set up some honeypot posts to track paid upvote accounts. They then go and pay these upvoters to upvote the honeypot post and identify the accounts used. (It would be helpful if the post was hidden so other people don't find it accidentally. In fact, it is possible to just use a tracking redirect page given only to the paid upvoters and use any post as the upvote "job" so it would be hard to identify by the upvoters.) Then Reddit could ghost those identified accounts. Simply ignore their votes in the system, but don't tell the account owners, so the owners continue using the accounts without realizing the problem. This would make it very difficult for the account owners to know which of their accounts were compromised. Then on any new posts where these upvoter accounts are being used in majority, other accounts can be found. The other accounts that also similarly upvoted on this article could represent other paid upvote accounts. Track those other accounts and how often they appear beside the ghosted paid accounts, and voila, you have found more paid upvoters. Keep doing this and it makes the paid upvoters ineffective because although they can work the system, their work is only being used to find other paid upvote accounts and also clients who are paying for paid upvotes. After a time period, the clients could be sent a warning: It has been detected that you are using paid upvote services which are against Reddit TOS. Please contact customer service so we can work together to remedy the problem. Failure to do so may cause your account to be banned and all your posts removed from Reddit. Have a good day. Of course Reddit doesn't have to do this, and really anyone could do the same process to build a list of paid upvoter accounts and a list of articles and clients that use those services... So what do you think, would this put a dent in the upvoters effectiveness?

5trokerac3 9y ago
IIR, there were a string of screenshots of Reddit admin/mod chats making the rounds last year where they were bemoaning how the Correct the Record money was going to start drying up. It's not just accounts that are bought and paid for. Every major social network is making money by shaping conversations around the interests of paying customers, political and otherwise.
9y ago

known 9y ago

VERIFY and TRUST; "Media does not spread free opinion; It generates opinion" --Oswald,1918 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West

paulpauper 9y ago

How about all the times this failed

Doubletough 9y ago

Looks like they've been shamed into submission and have pulled the article. It was getting hammered with comments earlier. Well deserved ones.

Neliquat 9y ago
Or their client list is now full and they pulled the ad.

soared 9y ago

Post was deleted, heres a cached link. mirror http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rGmQFErEWB8J:www.hack-pr.com/library/how-we-hacked-reddit-to-generate-5-million-media-impressions-in-3-days+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rGmQFEr...

Businessmen 9y ago

Should just setup a sting where we create multiple fiverr accounts and see who contacts us about what posts to try and promote

seoseokho 9y ago

Anybody have a copy of this? link is 404 now

mgcross 9y ago
Looks like it's archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20170710232311/http://www.hack-pr.com/library/how-we-hacked-reddit-to-generate-5-million-media-impressions-in-3-days https://web.archive.org/web/20170710232311/http://www.hack-p...
- seoseokho 9y ago
  Thanks! wonder why they took it down though

Simulacra 9y ago

I don't know if this is a hack, per se. I work in media and PR, and this is just one of those things you do. Pump up the issue, get eyeballs on the campaign, find a way to jazz the reporters, and off to the races. What may have made this fly is that the idea was already in the minds of the public, and the media. It's a LOT easier when that happens.